Got an Idea? Let us Know!

Do you have an idea you want to share with the Vault team? We want to hear from you on our Idea forum. Your thoughts could help us improve the product quality and efficiency by telling the group what areas we can improve to help you get your work done. When the community reads your idea, they can add comments that could continue to promote the concept and give it a vote. The votes tell the team how important it is to the community which may drive the idea to implementation.

Your idea can get more votes if the community, and the Vault team, can understand what you are stating by being clear and provide details on the problem you want to have solved. Let us talk about ways to make your ideas better seen and understood by everyone.

Idea Title

The title of your idea needs to attract the attention of the reader. Enter a title that is specific to what you want to be implemented. If the title is vague, readers may overlook your idea, and it may not receive community support. Here are a few examples.

Good Titles

• Add Alert Notifications To Vault
• Show names when adding users to an ECO routing list
• Vault Revision Table should not delete existing revisions from legacy drawings

The Content

Now that you have a title that attracts the reader, you will need to have a good description of the idea. I recommend that your content have four sections Description, Impact, Severity, and Solution.  Let us go into the details.

Description

The description should express the problem you want to have solved. Try to stay away from showing the way to solve the problem. For example, “make the download button bigger.” This description does not tell the reader why you need the download button bigger. By expressing the problem, it will give the reader a view of the workflow you are performing and why the workflow needs to be enhanced.  Your description should be a high-level view of the problem or the area you want to be improved along with why the current implementation doesn’t work. With a good description of the problem, the development team can evaluate many ways to address the issue that may also solve other issues you didn’t think about.

Impact

Describe how the problem impacts your companies business. How often do your users have to perform a workaround to the problem? Is your process inefficient because of the problem? Does this issue cause other issues if the workaround is not implemented consistently?

Severity

How severe is this problem in your opinion?

• Low – it is a nice to have. It has little to no impact on my business or process.
• Medium – this has a small impact on my business or process.
• High – this has a significant impact on my business or process.

Solution

In this section, provide an example of how you would solve the problem and include images if possible. Your example offers another set of information about what you are thinking and helps readers understand the problem area. Readers then can add votes to your idea and help promote it.

Promote your Idea

Try to get votes from the community by adding your ideas to your forum signature. When you post in the discussion forum, a good title could quickly get you more votes.

Conclusion

Keep your ideas coming in as we want to hear from you. Your ideas are regularly reviewed, and we may ask questions to help get clarity so make sure you respond when you see questions come in.